The police have arrested three people suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of a citizen on 21 February, a source from the National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) announced on Tuesday, 4 March, confirming that the victim had not been rescued.
‘We’re talking about a group indicted for the offences of robbery, criminal association and prohibited weapons. They may have participated in the kidnapping that took place on 21 February, in which a citizen of Portuguese origin was the victim,’ said Hilário Lole, Sernic’s spokesperson in Maputo city, during a press conference.
A citizen was kidnapped on that date by a group of four armed people in Polana Caniço, in Maputo city, a Sernic source told Lusa. ‘The victim is a 57-year-old man of Portuguese origin.’
According to the police, the man was kidnapped at around 7am at the Olympic Committee grounds in the Polana Caniço neighbourhood, a prime area of the country’s capital, by four men with AK47s.
Hilário Lole said that in the operation, which culminated in the arrest of the three suspects, the police also seized a pistol with 16 rounds of ammunition and an AK47 firearm, and said that investigations were underway to neutralise the other four involved.
The Republic of Mozambique Police (PRM) said that one of the suspects was one of more than 1,500 prisoners who escaped last December from the Special Maximum Security Penitentiary and Maputo Provincial Penitentiary establishments, located in Maputo province.
On 25 December 2024, 1,534 inmates escaped after riots in those establishments, located around 14 kilometres from the centre of the capital, which the police authorities considered to be ‘a premeditated action’ and the responsibility of demonstrators who, since October, had been on the streets protesting against the results of the general elections.
A wave of kidnappings has been affecting the country since 2011 and the victims are mainly businesspeople and their families, mainly people of Asian descent, a group that dominates commerce in the urban centres of the provincial capitals.
Around 150 businesspeople have been kidnapped in the last 12 years, with a hundred leaving the country out of fear, according to figures released in July by the Confederation of Economic Associations of Mozambique (CTA).
The majority of kidnappings committed in Mozambique are prepared outside the country, especially in South Africa, former attorney-general Beatriz Buchili said in Parliament in April 2024.
By March 2024, the police had recorded a total of 185 kidnappings, with at least 288 people arrested on suspicion of involvement in this type of crime since 2011, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
